networks, discourses, and practices of digital labor in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, our lecture engages with two primary data sources. First, with a critical discourse analysis, we examine the assumptions baked into digital labor development plans. Who are policy-makers seeking to connect? Who are the programmes they design intended to benefit? And what is left unsaid? Second, with digital trace and log data obtained from online marketplace administrators, we map value chains of digital labor in six African and Asian countries. This analysis explores market structures and distributions of revenue, pertaining to the role of geographies and distance in shaping clusters of power and inequalities in these networks. A key question addressed concern the accumulation of human capital: Do experienced laborers upgrade to higher-value added tasks? This comparative analysis of development discourses and actual chains of value in digital labor networks touching down at the world’s economic peripheries, ultimately allow us to begin to address whether any global inequalities can be effectively addressed through digital labor or whether such practices only reproduce and expand exploitative relationships. Mark Graham has presented research at over eighty-five conferences, workshops, and colloquiums since 2003. This includes keynotes and invited talks with institutions like: UNCTAD, the US State Department, the Wikimedia Foundation, TED, Re:Publica, SXSW, DFID, and a variety of international and regional academic conferences in the fields of Geography, Internet Studies, Development, African Studies, Communications, and Sociology. His work has been featured in over one hundred media outlets including The BBC, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist, The Telegraph, Wired, Der Spiegel, Il Sole 24 Ore, and many others. He has also written a series of articles about the social and economic effects of the Internet for the Guardian and The Atlantic.
Melissa Gira Grant Melissa Gira Grant a writer and freelance journalist covering sex, tech, and politics, in the streets and everywhere else. Her latest book, 34
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso, 2014) challenges the myths about selling sex and those who perpetuate them. Her reporting and commentary appears in The Nation, The New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, Dissent, Glamour, and The Guardian, among other publications. She lives in New York.
Mary L. Gray Monopsony Online: Crowdworking and Market Power
We analyze crowdsourcing as a labor market through the example of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), a popular, commercial site that allows anyone to post and complete small, paid tasks online. We consider how power dynamics between requesters (“employers”) and crowdworkers (“employees”) set the terms for and expectations of employment. In theory, crowdsourcing could circulate work fairly and directly to individuals seeking microtasks. However, as practiced, commercial crowdsourcing services, like AMT, 1) systematically occlude the information workers need to choose appropriate employment opportunities and 2) implicitly make individuals bear the high costs of finding viable tasks to do. We frame the AMT labor market in terms of monopsony to diagnose this dynamic. Monopsony typically describes a situation where an employer has a greater degree of wage-setting power because of the limited employment opportunities available to a pool of workers. For this reason, evaluating monopsony online has important implications for how we think about digital work. Our project therefore draws on ethnographic research and quantitative analysis of survey data to argue that market frictions give rise to the inequitable distribution of power among requesters and crowdworkers. We hypothesize market distortions on AMT are a result of 1) inadequate information about what we call the “goodness of tasks”; 2) high search costs imposed on workers; and, 2) reputation bias, which makes market entry prohibitive to new entrants. We conclude with insights from crowdworkers about how to reform online labor platforms to serve the needs and interests of all people dedicating their time and energy to crowdwork. Mary L. Gray studied anthropology before receiving her PhD in Communication from the